World of Warcraft: Current Year

We appreciate all of the feedback, but go fuck yourselves

As we read most everything posted here (and elsewhere) about next week’s content update, we can’t help but be impacted by the subject of transportation portal removal. It’s a subject that’s approaching 5000 replies in one thread alone, and the question raised there, repeatedly, has been, “why?” Here’s the answer to that question.

From the beginnings of World of Warcraft, game designers have had a number of guiding principles. Sometimes these notions change quickly, and sometimes they evolve slowly, but a few guiding principles have remained more or less the same throughout WoW’s history. One such lodestar has been “don’t overuse portals between locations in the world”. Too many eliminations of the distances between places can diminish a sense of the world having a meaningful size.

Of course there’s an equal and opposite design consideration—“don’t make it too inconvenient to get from most places to most other places”. Some amount of convenience is vital. Not every visit to a wondrous landscape is your first. We know when it’s your 100th visit, you don’t want the flight over to be the bulk of your time spent. And of course, some players have chosen to play as Warlocks or Mages specifically because those classes offer unique means of transport.

With new expansions, we’ve made a tradition of removing some of the portals from the previous expansion’s cities. The goal with that is to encourage transportation flow through newer places where players are more likely to interact with other players. We neglected to do that initially following Legion (and we never did that following Mists of Pandaria for various reasons), but we feel that we should have. We’re correcting that now.

Boralus and Dazar’alor will continue to offer portals to a full range of capital cities, as well as to Silithus. The portals to Cataclysm zones will remain intact, and many other modes of transportation, such as Dalaran Signet Rings, Karazhan’s ring, the Timeless Isle trinket, Coordination Cloaks, and boats and zeppelins between many regions, will all be retained and functional.

However, we’ve seen how updates to the game can leave the means of accessing different areas feeling increasingly chaotic. For example— today if you go to the Cleft of Shadows in Orgrimmar, you’ll find it dotted with portals in a way that almost looks sporadic. We’re cleaning that up, and we see this as an opportunity to consolidate a lot of travel into a consistent venue with a consistent look and feel, and room for future growth when needed.

We’ve processed a lot of feedback on this, especially feedback about specific locations that feel like they’re going to become disproportionately inconvenient to reach, and we’ve followed that feedback through to the conclusion that you’re seeing on the PTR. We believe that the numerous remaining means of quick access in the game make most locations quite reachable.

If there are any specific locations that feel as though they’re about to become unreasonably inaccessible, we’re certainly open to adding additional means of travel in the future.

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Maybe if something is too inconvenient, we will consider giving it back to you, someday.

Wait what? One of their guiding principles handed down from high atop the mountain was "don't overuse portals between locations int he world" and then in the same post they concede that they haven't been pruning portals for going on seven years? Admit it, you just thought "lodestar" was a cool world.

This shit only makes sense as the tyrannical executive decision of a obsessive-compulsive autist that can only break his "touch door-knob wash hand whistle Oh Susanna" OCD loop by making World of Warcraft worse through declaration.

Personally, I understand the philosophy in a vacuum. But in reality I don't see how they find this to be logical. Possible it's just one more measure to keep players in the game world longer? I know that sounds tin foil hat crazy, but at this point Publishers and investors are counting the seconds. Could this potentially be spurred by that?

The portal system among other things really killed EQ for me. When they dropped it in WoW, it was more palatable because WoW isn't EQ and *because* of EQ's induction of said system, I wasn't surprised. In the same vein as the no flying til X.2 patch, they believe it will create a sense of intimacy w/ the world. What I don't think they're realizing is that people haven't truly cared about the world since TBC or Wrath, depending upon your predilections. Portals have been in the game too long and removing them is too much of a jolt to what people are used to. WoW hasn't been about the 'journey' since Vanilla (IMO), and if the game isn't about the journey, then there's no point in creating this artificial romance w/ your game world.

Then get rid of the dungeon/raid/pvp insta ques from anywhere in the world. Make people travel to those since its actually new content youre passing over

Give mages portals to every one they're taking out. Then they can shift the attack vector.

Every character in FFXIV can port around at will and it doesn't detract from the game. I'm sure in Ion's world removing those portals equates somehow to people staying logged in longer thus meeting their time played metric.

Tauntworth said:

Personally, I understand the philosophy in a vacuum. But in reality I don't see how they find this to be logical. Possible it's just one more measure to keep players in the game world longer? I know that sounds tin foil hat crazy, but at this point Publishers and investors are counting the seconds. Could this potentially be spurred by that?

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I don't think it's tin foil crazy. Their stocks are reeling and their "time played" metric they report to shareholders has taken a nosedive since BfA. BfA was engineered from the ground up to massively pad playtime on Ion's treadmill, which drove tons of players away. I'm sure they noticed by now that a number of their remaining subs are exclusively doing old content, so gotta do what we can to pad their playtime too.

Malakriss said:

Give mages portals to every one they're taking out. Then they can shift the attack vector.

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This rustles me more than the actual portal removals. They keep saying "you can play a mage for portals!" but what people are mad about is removal of shit like Dalaran Crater, Wyrmrest Temple, Karazhan, Caverns of Time portals which mages don't get (ok they have crater).

Ion is like the Bobby Kotick of gamedevs.

Kotick once said that he wants to take all the fun out of making video games. Ion wants to take all the fun out of actually playing video games.

I have to say, as a person who has mained a mage for most of the past 15 years, is that this is fucking retarded.

When I've played a different class alt (notably Shaman and then Monk most recently a shadow Priest) I cringed at how annoying it was to get around the damn world and how much thought I needed to put into where I placed my hearthstone in order to be able to get around. I thought the whole point of these new portal rooms in the capital cities was to make it easier to get around, not more difficult. Sheesh.

They are so full of shit.

The main reason they want to pull the portals away is to add yet another small method of keeping players playing on the servers. Every action they appear to have taken for this expansion revolves around that core idea. Time gated content, Dailies, No flying, weaker characters, and now the removal of portals, all force a character to remain logged in for just a little bit longer. The next thing they might due is require a fairly expensive reagent for mages to use the group teleports. It really is sad at this point.

The whole idea of playing a game is to enjoy the game. If I want to see old content, then I would go see the old content. I have the ability to travel and explore a zone anytime I want to. Its just that there is no compelling reason for me to go. Its not like they are changing the older content to be this whole new story that nobody has seen before. Can you imagine getting told by your boss that as part of the job you must now walk to work? The job feels that employees do not take the time to explore and enjoy the world in which they drive through. Then you find out that your employer owns multiple businesses on the way to work and things begin to make sense.

Its a game. Its not meant to be "real". Its meant to be fun and enjoyable. Taking actions that make a game more tedious only serves to give players more time to reflect as to why they even bother playing this game. In the end they will just have less player server time as players just stop playing.

"You're gonna like us removing the portals. I guarantee it."

Dom said:

Another theory is that it falls under the clear indications that they've been scaling back their backend for years now (support/server infrastructure/automation of a lot of things) and that they're able to allocate server resources away from the now-redundant Dalaran v2 into current stuff. Those people jumping over to those instances just to use the portals instead of the already active Org/SW might be something they wanted to cut out.

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This makes a lot of sense when you look at how poorly optimized many things are in this game, like Legion Dalaran. I have a beast of a machine (8 core Ryzen 7, 32gig of ram, 1080ti) and I get frame issues like crazy in certain portions of the game. Which is ridiculous.

Dom said:

Another example of the backend stuff, remember how they cut out the cross-server grouping addons, and gimped the forming process as much as possible? That was due to the server loads it was causing. I can't imagine that people zoning into Dal (which is now cross realm) for just ~30 seconds is all that different from phasing onto another realm to do a world quest.

I'd bet that during/after WoD, when the signs of there being significant influence from Activision/et al increased dramatically, there was a movement to reduce costs and removing these sorts of things was a part of it. Not only could they be classified as fat that could be removed to save costs, but their removal would have a time-engagement factor as a bonus.

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WoW and D3 are two soupy feeling games. The network latency is fine, but it feels like I am playing them remotely. I frequently have to bang on keys twice to get them to register. None of my other games are like this. The best way to describe it is having a Porsche, but the steering column is made out of rubber. They must have some pretty freaky shit going on in the ass end of this game.

Dom said:

Another example of the backend stuff, remember how they cut out the cross-server grouping addons, and gimped the forming process as much as possible? That was due to the server loads it was causing. I can't imagine that people zoning into Dal (which is now cross realm) for just ~30 seconds is all that different from phasing onto another realm to do a world quest.

I'd bet that during/after WoD, when the signs of there being significant influence from Activision/et al increased dramatically, there was a movement to reduce costs and removing these sorts of things was a part of it. Not only could they be classified as fat that could be removed to save costs, but their removal would have a time-engagement factor as a bonus.

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To speak to this, one of the main reasons it was an issue for the wq group finder addon was that most times you wouldn't be immediately done in a zone after finishing that WQ, and occasionally it would just dump you on other servers and leave you there even after you left group. Far more than once it would just put me in South American servers (thanks Ragnaros) and my ping would remain 150+ until I either joined another group, or logged for a few minutes.

Dalaran really doesn't matter if you suffer from slightly higher ping, plus the chances of you flying to a different zone or teleporting out that resets your phase will likely set you back to normal immediately anyways.

I'm just pointing it out, not disagreeing with anything. The servers are completely trash right now. I've been doing large scale wpvp when bored and we routinely halt entire zones because this MMO is incapable of having.. massive amounts of multiplayers online. 40v40 raids in any zone will lag everyone in it until enough people die. It's also kind of atrocious that AV ran better 14 years ago than it does now, for the same reason.